Jennifer Higgie’s Empathetic Elegy for Richard Dadd
Jennifer Higgie’s novel Bedlam, originally published by Sternberg Press in 2006 and reissued by Verso in July 2026, reimagines English painter Richard Dadd’s transformative 1842 European and Middle Eastern expedition. Rather than sensationalizing Dadd’s documented mental deterioration and 1842 patricide at age 26, Higgie adopts his voice in fragmented first-person narrative, tracing how his work as a draughtsman for Sir Thomas Phillips catalyzed psychological crisis. The novel explores Dadd’s philosophical anguish regarding representation—the gap between observed reality and artistic rendering—as hallucinations gradually overtake rational perception. Higgie’s approach collapses the boundaries between documented history and imaginative reconstruction, allowing readers to inhabit Dadd’s disorienting descent toward psychosis rather than observe it clinically. The work engages Dadd’s uncanny, Orientalist aesthetic output, including paintings executed at Broadmoor Hospital, where the artist spent decades confined.
Original article published on Hyperallergic — AI-generated summary. Visit the website to read the full article at the source. Image via Hyperallergic.
